By Dan Moren

May 15, 2018 12:27 PM PT

Tapbots releases Tweetbot 3 for Mac

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Tapbots released Tweetbot 3 for macOS this afternoon, three years after its last major release, Tweetbot 2. This update features an overhauled UI, a dark mode, and an easier way to preview media. John Voorhees at MacStories has a really in-depth overview of everything that’s new.

My feelings on the update are more mixed. Tweetbot has been my client of choice on the Mac for several years now, and I’ve grown attached to its way of doing things. Tweetbot 3 feels largely very similar but makes a number of smaller changes that are going to take some time getting used to.

For example, the client now shows buttons for replying, retweeting, liking, etc. on every single tweet, rather than simply the tweet that’s selected or that you mouse over. It feels more cluttered to me, though I can see the argument that the features are less hidden than before. Likewise, the retweet indicator for tweets has moved from the bottom to the top, which is a bit jarring.

I had hoped that an update to the Mac version of Tweetbot would add the same Stats view that has long been in the iOS client, but no dice here in version 3, to my disappointment. Furthermore, the Activity and Mentions views are now both sub-sections of the Notifications view, mimicking Twitter’s web interface, which makes them harder to access, and impossible to navigate via the keyboard.

Tweetbot 3 does improve the app’s column management: you can simply drag near the bottom of window to create a second column, or drag back to remove an existing column. It’s a handy feature, but as someone who uses columns only once every few months, it doesn’t do much for me. And though dark mode is attractive, I wish the title bar would change to a darker color as well.¹

Of course, the big disappointment here belongs not to Tapbots, but to Twitter itself, which still keeps certain features to itself instead of sharing with third-party developers. Polls, group direct messages, and Twitter bookmarks are all absent here–though, if you ask me, that’s a fair trade for a simple chronological timeline that’s ad-free.

Despite it being 2018, I’m sure there will be some fuss that Tweetbot 3 is a brand new $10 purchase from the Mac App Store, regardless of whether or not you own a previous version of the app. I’m not one to begrudge developers their income, especially as Tweebot 2 was a free update from the original Tweetbot. Shelling out $10 every six years or so is more than reasonable to me.

Though I’m not sold on all of Tweetbot 3’s changes yet, I figure I’ll spend a while using the new app before I decide whether it’ll truly become my new Twitter client of choice.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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